Saturday, October 31, 2009

It's Saturday morning and I'm blogging from the Safeway (Oh brave new world! that has such breakfast nooks in it.) Today the con begins in grim seriousness. I'll be pontificating about steampunk and sharing my thoughts on "fun reads" (I'm tempted to say something like, "Fun?! Reading is grim business, sirrah!" but shan't), reading Poe's "The Raven," arguing about Urban Fantasy, and doing who knows what else. It should be fun.

Yesterday, I saw Zoran Zivcovic meet Darrell Schweitzer for the first time ("Darrell! At last!"), was chatting with Lizzie Lynn when she asked, "Do you know Grania Davis?" and then, rather than tell me an interesting story, as I expected, revealed that Grania was sitting beside her, plotted future publicity with my editor, signed literally hundreds of books, heard lots of gossip, learned lots of news, and . . . well, I could go on like this for hours.

Nobody's commented on the Google settlement thing. But I talked with some industry insiders last night and learned that it's even worse than I made it sound. People Who Know were using phrases like "The total destruction of the publishing industry." And not rhetorically. Literally.

Anyway, that's where things stand right now. Right now, it's back into the fray. I just wanted to keep you guys posted.

Friday, October 30, 2009

The World Fantasy Con is a great place to meet old friends again -- Jeff Ford, Stan Robinson, Beth Gwinn, Terry Bisson . . . oh, the list is too long to even begin. But it's also a business event, and as such a great source of information.

Some of which can be alarming.

Above: The Google Books Settlement panel, discussing the agreement by which Google (whose motto is famously: "Some Men Rob You With a Gun. Others With a Fountain Pen"), and the Authors Guild (I don't even know who those yutzes are) agreed that Google could offer my work for sale on the Internet without my permission. Or anyway, that's the version I'd heard.

I'd been feeling guilty because I'd missed the opt-out date. Turns out that the the opt-out option was never intended to be workable. Every edition and every separate publication of a work is treated as a separate entity, see, and has to be listed with detailed info -- including specific page numbers -- or else it belongs to Google.

Last night I dreamed that somebody had broken into my house and stolen all the rugs, and was selling them cheap at a yard sale.

What the hell could that mean? I puzzled over it for a long time. And then it came to me:

I should get into the rug business.

So let this blog serve as public notice: I am claiming the right to sell any rugs or carpets belonging the the CEO, owners, and all employees of Google. There will be bargains galore! You need a 10 X 10 silk bakhara for your living room? I'm prepared to sell it to you for eight hundred dollars. Wow! And the former owners won't be left out in the cold either. They'll get a full five percent royalties, capped at sixty dollars maximum per rug.

Anybody who wants to opt out of this arrangement can contact me with the type, location, thread-count, and country of origin for each rug by, oh, let's say December 13.

Thursday, October 29, 2009

I've got several friends in San Francisco who would be ticked if I said that the above are my favorite mammals in their fair city. But, oh man, the sea lions at Pier 39! They just moved in one day, some years ago, and as of yesterday there were 1,651 just hanging out, fifteen feet from the tourists. They laze, quarrel, brag, loll, fight, play, and (mostly) goof off. The noise they make is extraordinary.

And the smell! Wet dog ain't even in it. More like rancid cheese. If the rancid cheese in question weighed two hundred pounds and invited fifteen hundred of his friends to join him.

Absolutely charming.

The signing at Borderlands was an enormous success (as it should have been!) and I got to chat with David Drake and to meet Garth Nix, so I was happy. Then into a bus -- imagine what a bus loaded down with writers sounds like; yeah, sort of like sea lions -- and off to San Jose.

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

I'm in San Francisco, doing a quick, late-night blog at the King George Hotel. After a long and uneventful flight, Marianne and I were met by our pal Jacob Weisman of Tachyon Publications, who swiftly and efficiently drove us into town. His wife Rina was not there because she was busily driving truckloads of books about town -- apparently the gimme bag at the World Fantasy Convention is going to be something spectacular.

Tomorrow, a day of wandering around this beautiful city, two hours autographing at Borderlands Books, and then off to San Jose!

Monday, October 26, 2009

So how did you spend your weekend? I spent mine rewriting the first 16,000 words of my novel to make them into a stand-alone story, and then cutting, cutting, cutting, so I can read it within the hour given me at the World Fantasy Convention this coming weekend. And I am still cutting. We'll see if I can manage it in time.

Why am I putting myself through this? Well, when I do a reading, I prefer it be something which is a) unpublished, and b) a complete story. Especially when the con makes me a Guest of Honor, as the WFC has.

Have I mentioned that I'm a Guest of Honor at the World Fantasy Con?

Oh yeah, and I also went to Kyle Cassidy's and Trillian Stars' fabulous wedding celebration. That's the happy couple above. May they live longer and be happier than Marianne and me. But may she and I first live a million years and always be as happy together as we are now.

If you're going to the World Fantasy Convention . . .

. . . where, as I may not have mentioned, I'm a Guest of Honor . . . here's my schedule to date. Things will doubtless be added, and if I have time and can get wi-fi in primitive, distant San Jose, California, I'll add them. But this is what I have now.

If you see me, say Hi. I'll be busy as hell. But I won't have anything better to do.

Wednesday

Autographing at Borderlands Books in San Francisco - a group signing of authors who've come to San Jose for the WFC and are making themselves available for those who'd like an autograph but don't want to buy a convention membership and spend a weekend having a good time to get it. A good deal and a great location: BorderlandsCafe.

Borderlands Books and Borderlands Cafe are at 866 - 870 Valencia Street between 19th and 20th Streets in the Mission District.

And that's it for officially scheduled stuff. The picture to the right? Trillian Stars and Kyle Cassidy cut their wedding cake! After which, they did not stuff cake into each other's faces. A very elegant couple, Kyle and Trillian are.

Friday, October 23, 2009

I still have a Theo Gray book to blog about, but I'm putting it off 'til next week because The Drabblecast has just posted an audio podcast of my short story, "Hello," Said the Stick.

So how did I come to write that story in the first place? I'm glad you asked. It began when I went to a reading by a friend whose name I shall discreetly elide. Mere minutes into the reading I had discovered two facts:

1) That I already knew the piece, since I'd read it in manuscript, and

For a time, there was some entertainment to be had from determining whether or not a verbal fumble and correction would be made in literally every sentence read. But then it became clear that, yes, it would, and boredom set in. I started word-doodling in my notebook, creating neologisms and writing down odd sentences. One of which was: "Hello," said the stick.

Huh, I thought. That's intriguing. It would make a good first sentence for a story.

So, while the reading droned on, I played around with the notion. By the end of the evening, I had a couple of paragraphs and a good idea of the plot. I borrowed the idea of mercenaries fighting with weapons well below their culture's technological level from Larry Niven's "Night on Mispec Moor," and his clean, lean, stripped-down prose style as well.

The next morning was a Saturday. After breakfast, I said to Marianne, "I think I'll spend the day writing, if that's okay with you."

"Have fun," she said.

So I went to my office, wrote the story, and dropped it in the mail to Analog before the post office closed at 2 that afternoon. From original conception to actual submission in a grand total of eighteen hours -- and I got to sleep in late in between!

Oh, yeah, and it made it onto the Hugo ballot.

There is no moral to this anecdote. But, oh, if only everything I wrote came half so easily!

You can find The Drabblecast here or go straight to the podcast here. The podcast also includes "Eat the Dog," by Reverend John Sleestaxx

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

In the mail yesterday was my contributor's copy of The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, fresh out from Tachyon Publications to celebrate the 60th anniversary of F&SF. And there I am! Alongside the likes of Harlan Ellison, Ray Bradbury, and Kurt Vonnegut. These guys are the heroes of my youth, to say nothing of being icons of American literature.

Are you impressed yet? No? Then let's look at individual story titles: There's Shirley Jackson's "One Ordinary Day, With Peanuts," James Tiptree, Jr.'s "The Women Men Don't See," and Daniel Keyes' "Flowers for Algernon." These are some of the best and most famous stories our genres have ever produced. And my own "Mother Grasshopper" is among them!

So you'd think that nothing -- nothing! -- could possibly kill the pleasure I felt, right?

Man, you don't know editors.

Pictured above is the letter Gordon Van Gelder enclosed with the book. Read it and weep.

Pictured to the right is the cover of this still-extraordinary anthology. That little dot alongside it is my once-robust ego, rendered to scale.

[Whoops. I accidentally took in a couple of the blog's readers. My bad. Gordon was joking, as he frequently does. As indicated by the fact that Bester died in 1987. Though it would be great if he were still around.]

Monday, October 19, 2009

Did you catch last night's game between the Phillies and the Dodgers? Astounding! Particularly if you're a Phillies fan.

It put me in mind of the time when I was in Yekaterinburg and a Russian fan asked me why anybody would bother to watch baseball. Now, I'm always a lot better on rewrite than I am on first draft, and that day more so than usually. So I floundered through something lame about there always being the possibility of winning, no matter how far down you are.

"So it's all random, you mean?" my friend asked.

No, no! It's not like that at all, and if you don't understand baseball, you'll never understand America.

Everybody understands football. It's the face America presents to the world: We are bigger and stronger and tougher than you are and if you don't show us respect we'll crush you under the treads of our offensive line. It's all about power. But baseball is who we actually are. Baseball is all about heart.

"Baseball," I should have said back then, "is a morality play. It's a distillation of our lives and souls, and it's made up almost entirely of failure and redemption."

There's more than enough failure in this country, in these lives. There are long, long stretches when you're at the bottom of the league and batting .100, times when you just can't catch a break and nothing you do works. But every day you suit up and step back up to the plate. There are times when the world is cold and Cliff Lee is hot and you can do nothing but strike out, over and over and over again. You learn exactly how bitter failure can taste. But you keep on slugging.

Los Angeles had a night like that Sunday.

But then -- not often, because the game is rigged so it only happens rarely -- you get a night like Philadelphia had yesterday. Your pitches are hard and true. You rip one into the stands. Everything falls into place.

This doesn't just happen. It's earned. It takes hard work, determination, skill, practice . . . and heart. Or maybe a better word for it is spirit. You don't start out with that kind of spirit; it's forged in the smithy of failure.

Failure is so much of our lives. That's why America's favorite team is not the Yankees, but the Cubs. That's why everybody was so elated when the Red Sox finally took the pennant. It proved that all this failure was not without purpose. It showed that there's a chance of redemption for all of us.

Friday, October 16, 2009

When I was a student at the College of William and Mary, Chem 101 was taught by the head of the department. Invariably, he began each lecture by explaining how one of the chemicals under discussion that day could be used to play a practical joke. This one would make a fine contact explosive that could be painted on the steps to the Chem Building, that one if insinuated into the drinking water, would turn everybody's urine blue, a third would blow a utility building sky-high, and so on. It was, I thought at first, his equivalent of opening with a joke. Certainly, we all laughed.

But eventually I twigged that the one thing all the practical jokes had in common was that they were very, very public. What the Head of the Chemistry Department (I've forgotten his name, alas; he wore a bow tie, of course) was doing was trolling for chemists: If he had a natural anywhere in his class, a true chemist, a born chemist, that person would not be able to resist trying these tricks out, and the dept. head, knowing one was out there, would seek out him or her to mentor and encourage.

That was a sad moment for me, because I realized then that I was not a chemist, nor ever would be. I regret that, because to be a chemist is a fine thing, and probably as close to being a Mad Scientist as is possible in real life. Certainly, every chemist I've ever known has a streak of anarchy that could only be satisfied by working late into the night to concoct explosives or synthesize LSD ... not because they were anti-social, necessarily, but just because, well, who could resist?

Theodore Gray was one of those natural chemists. He grew up, co-founded Wolfram Research (of Mathematica fame), won an Ig Nobel Prize (for his Wooden Periodic Table -- check it out here, but be prepared to spend a lot of time wandering about), and has now published a book of experiments that you really-o truly-o ought not to try at home. With careful step-by-step instructions.

Theo Gray's Mad Science is chock-a-block with fun things to do that could cost you an eye, a leg, your home, your liberty, and in some cases even your life if your lab technique isn't everything it should be.

Highlights of this luxuriously illustrated book include instructions on how to:

Make ice cream in 30 seconds, using liquid nitrogen.

Shrink coins to half their size.

Build your own cloud chamber.

Make exploding hydrogen bubbles.

Preserve snowflakes for decades.

Make your own salt out of sodium and chlorine.

And much, much more. Most of it, as I said, terribly dangerous. I suspect most of the book's readers are, like myself, armchair chemists, who might do two or three of the safer expiriments but are no more likely to start mucking about with thermite than crime readers are to heist the Koh-i-Noor Diamond. But there will be some readers who have the right stuff and they're going to use this volume like a cookbook. God bless 'em. I hope they take Theo's safety advice extremely seriously. Particularly the bit about buying lots of top-grade safety glasses.

So how did I come upon this wonderfully demented tome? Theodore Gray sent me a copy. He's sort of a friend, you see. We've never met in person, but he wrote the introduction to the PS Publishing book version of my Periodic Table of Science Fiction (which I recently put back online here), and we occasionally swap e-mails. I strongly approve of Theo. We're both in the same business: That of trying to make the world a more interesting place.

Actually, he sent me two books. I'll blog about the other one sometime next week.

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

My friend Kyle Cassidy has been taking photos of Tenzin Gyatso, who defines himself as "a simple Buddhist monk" and is also the current Dalai Lama. You can read his take on the experience and his appropriately color-saturated photos here.

Monday, October 12, 2009

Like everybody else, including the recipient, I was astonished when Barack Obama won the Nobel Prize for Peace. Clearly, the Nobel Committee were (a) trying to encourage the man to bring about peace more than actually reward him for having done so, and (b) afraid that if they waited for the end of his term, they wouldn't be able to give him the prize. So in one deft move, they managed to offend both the American Right and the American Left by giving our president the single most prestigious award in the world.

Deftly done, Nobel Committee!

But the REAL scandal is, of course, the news that against all reason I have once again been passed over for the award. And so, for what is surely the last year, I must again post . . .

My Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

(Presented Here Against the Unlikely Chance I Never Get to Deliver It)

It's about time!

You lousy bastards should have given this to me decades ago, and you fucking well know it. Look at the morons and retards you have given it to. Okay, so Albert Einstein, personal hygiene aside, wasn't a total loser. But Niels Bohr, Desmond Tutu, Ilya Prigogine, the Dalai Lama? You'd think this award was being given for having a funny name! And whoever decided it would be a cute joke to give the prize in literature to the likes of Thomas Mann, Anatole France, and Selma Lagerlof obviously never bothered trying to read those boring old windbags. To say nothing of that self-promoting fraud, Mother Theresa!

I could go on, but I think my point is made.

The Nobel Prize was created by Alfred Nobel, who was—I trust I'm not hurting anybody's feelings here—a neurotic recluse and a mass-murdering Swede. So, when one considers the source, I really shouldn't be surprised that you only gave me the one. There are five, you know. (I don't count the Economics thingie as a real Nobel, and neither should you.) It's not as if the single greatest Writer/Peacemaker [note to self: scratch out whichever category these idiots neglect to honor me in] the world has ever known couldn't be adept in chemistry and physics and medicine as well. I assure you I could. Not that I have, granted. I've been busy. But surely intentions should count for something.

Oh, and a word about the venue. Stockholm?? InDecember??? No wonder your bikini team never showed up.

So here's what I propose: Vegas, obviously, for the climate. Ditch the king—nice guy, but no Robin Williams. For the MC, rather than doing the safe thing with Madonna or J-Lo, go visionary with the Osborne Family. Can you picture them wandering aimlessly about the stage? Hilarious. Maybe we can even convince Ozzie to bite the head off a (fake) bat.

To get television coverage in the major markets, you're going to need music—Guns N' Roses, Aerosmith, maybe even get the Stones out of retirement and back in spandex again. Back 'em up with a few flash-pots and some fly-girl dancers. Filmed testimonials from Michael Jackson and the Simpsons. Choreography from The Producers. A line of Elvis impersonators. Dignified and elegant, that's the key. Keep the wire-work to a minimum.

I get shivers just thinking about it.

Now I realize that these suggestions might seem startling to some. But that's why I'm up here and you're down there—because I'm a genius and you're not. So shut up and think it over.

Meanwhile, I accept this award with a modesty so profound that pissants like you cannot even begin to comprehend it.

Thank you.

The above was taken from Michael Swanwick's Periodic Table of the Elements. You can view it here, or the entire 118-story run of elements here.

Friday, October 9, 2009

I'm traveling today, tapping this out on a palmtop while I finish my coffee in preparation for a hard day's work. So today's post will be short, even for me. But I made a cartoon, or I guess a fumetta, the other day, and I thought I'd share it with you.

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

I get free books in the mail now and then, and my reaction to them varies from an elated "Hey, look what I got!" to a sullen, "Life is too short to read stuff like this."

Today, I opened a package from Sirius Fiction and said, "Oh my God!' I'd just gotten a copy of the second (expanded) edition of Lexicon Urthus, Michael Andre-Driussi's dictionary of the strange and wonderful words in Gene Wolfe's Urth cycle (the Book of the New Sun quartetand related texts), and a reviewer's copy of the spanking-new The Wizard Knight Companion, subtitled A Lexicon for Gene Wolfe's The Knight and The Wizard.

Then I showed Marianne the new book and she took it out of my hands and did not give it back.

There's a lot of scholarship, both true and faux, attached to science fiction and fantasy books nowadays, but such efforts are particularly rewarding when applied to Wolfe's oeuvre, because he puts so much more into his works than almost any other writer.

As an example, here's a Lexicon Urthus word which, because I once worked for the National Solar Heating and Cooling Information Center, I was able to shed some light upon. In the Book of the New Sun, Severian has a fuligin cloak, blacker than black, whose warmth he several times praises. The word is derived from fuliginous, meaning sooty or soot-colored:

fuligin a sooty color, powdered black (1, chap. 4, 39).Commentary: the descriptions of this color as being "blacker than black" (aside from the powerful sin aspect) indicate to Michael Swanwick that it is actually "selective black," a black that absorbs light beyond the visible spectrum and into the ultraviolet. Selective coatings are used on solar collectors to maximize absorption of radiation. It is a notion that engineer Wolfe would definitely be familiar with, and the seeming paradox of having a practical explanation would fit his sense of humor. Presumably a fuligin cloak would be unusually warm.

What I want to point out about this is that it's the literary equivalent of what programmers call "Easter eggs," hidden messages or treats placed into games or programs for the lucky (or canny) person to find, which are not necessary for your enjoyment of the experience.

People who seek these things out tend to make Wolfe's books sound like a riddle inside in an enigma wrapped in something that's too much work to be much fun. Not true. Okay, there are a couple of his books which are not for the weak-minded. But you can do a fast and superficial reading of The Knight and The Wizard (originally submitted to Wolfe's editor as a single book, The Wizard Knight, but broken in two for reasons of publishing economics) and not only have a good time but get everything that's most important about it: The examination of what qualities make a man a knight and the ending, which could hardly be clearer in its meaning. Nobody literally needsThe Wizard Knight Companion.

But some of us -- and we know who we are, we happy few, you and I -- want it anyway. Simply because when we love a book, we want to understand it better. Also because we have a weakness for Easter eggs.

For us, there is Michael Andre-Driussi's book. For which I am duly grateful.

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Zeppelin City, the brilliant collaborative story between Eileen Gunn and, well, (cough) me, has just been published on Tor.com as part of their special October theme of Steampunk Month.

Eileen surely exaggerates when she claims the story was fourteen years in the making. But I do seem to recall that all the tech was cutting edge when we started it.

Will you love it? Considering that it has a girl inventor named Radio Jones, an ornithopter pilot named Amelia Spindizzy, and giant naked brains afloat in bottles, the real question is not whether you'll love it, but how could you not?

Plus, the story has the ingredient that all the Web has been screaming for: It's free.

Monday, October 5, 2009

When the lamentably titled but greatly-missed webzine SciFiction went under, it took with it Michael Swanwick's Periodic Table of Science Fiction. Recently, even the unauthorized mirror site went down, apparently because some other working writer pointed out to the proprietor that publishing people's work without their permission is simply not nice. Which meant that if you wanted to read those stories, you either had find a copy of the out-of-print PS Publishingbook or else know Serbian.

MSPToSF, if you came in late, was a series of 118 short-short stories, one for each element in the periodic table, which were written and posted in order, one per week, over the course of roughly two years. During much of that time, I was also writing and posting a weekly series of 80 short-shorts for Eileen Gunn's webzine The Infinite Matrix, one for each of the etchings in Goya's Los Caprichos, which I titled The Sleep of Reason. Writers used to turn pale and cross themselves when I walked into a room.

Well, I've posted the MSPToSF stories again, here on Blogspot. I don't have the nifty clickable periodic table interface that the SciFiction website had. But all the stories are there for you to read, and a pretty nifty batch they are too, if I do say so myself.

You can find them at www.periodictableofsciencefiction.blogspot.com. Or just click here.

You can still find The Sleep of Reason online by clicking here. I have to warn you, though, that in deference to Goya's dark vision, some of it is pretty bleak stuff.

At top: The cover for the book version of The Periodic Table of Science Fiction. I always loved that woodcut.

Friday, October 2, 2009

Yesterday morning, I was watching elk fighting on the side of a mountain of mine tailings, and last night I was at a production of Beckett's Happy Days (with a brilliant performance by Mary Elizabeth Scallen). This is either the strangest of all rich worlds or the richest of all strange worlds.

Above: One of a gazillion snapshots I took. Really, I should've brought a sound recorder to capture the bull elks bugling. It's a sound like no other.

Oh, and an open question . . .

I'm thinking of maybe sometime next year writing an essay on flash fiction. In preparation for which I really ought to assemble a list of the masters of the form. I'm talking about people who have actual books, or at least locatable web collections.

Offhand, I'd have to include Julio Cortazar for Chronopios and Famas, Franz Kafka for Parables and Paradoxes, Carol Lay for her Story Minutecompilations, and Lynda Barry for various Ernie Pook's Comeek collections.